No less deplorable from Lovestone’s point of view were signs that the OPC was attempting to usurp his control of FTUC field operatives. Etter, for example, was approached with an offer of a large salary if he performed
“extra-curricular” activities or took full-time employment with “another
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organization.”27 Similar efforts were made “to drive a wedge” between Lovestone and his most valuable asset, Brown, but the latter loyally resisted the OPC’s blandishments.28 When the co-option of Lovestoneite personnel failed, the OPC went outside the apparatus of the FTUC altogether, using other Americans in the field, such as Rome labor attaché Tom Lane, instead.29 Lovestone, who appears to have had a low opinion of government officers in general, thought this tactic extremely foolish, not least because it increased the possibility of exposure. “In view of the type of rich dishes that Uncle Tom has been serving up, a number of my friends will not touch any spaghetti shipment,” he complained to Lillie Brown in March 1951. “They don’t want to be involved in such filthy kitchens.”30
Worse still, the OPC would invoke the name of the AFL in operations that had nothing to do with the FTUC. Brown in particular objected to this practice because it threatened to tarnish his personal reputation in Europe. He and Lovestone retaliated by withholding intelligence from the OPC; withdrawing from involvement in other front operations, such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom; and refusing to cooperate with a CIA agent in Brown’s office, Leon Dale.
It is not hard to understand the OPC’s reasons for sometimes bypassing the FTUC. Lovestone was a notorious intriguer, and there were those in the intelligence service who (as one spy put it) “couldn’t quite accustom themselves to the fact that we were giving money to the former head of the Communist Party.”31 Official concerns about security can hardly have been allayed by the assignment to the FTUC staff in June 1950 of Carmel Offie. Among the many eccentric characters to be found in Lovestone’s circle, Offie was surely the oddest. The son of poor Italian immigrants, grotesquely ugly, and flamboyantly homosexual, the “Monk” (his ironic Lovestoneite code name) had risen through the ranks of the U.S. foreign service by dint of his extraordinary skills as a political fixer and “modern-day court-jester”—in Paris during the 1930s, he had arranged dates for the young John F. Kennedy and played bridge with Wallis Simpson. In 1947, however, he was caught using the diplomatic pouch for unauthorized currency transfers (he also smuggled rubles, diamonds, and, on one occasion, three hundred Finnish lobsters).32 Flung out of the diplomatic corps, Offie was picked up by Wisner on the recommendation of Chip Bohlen (Kennan was another admirer) and given special responsibility for émigré affairs. He soon made himself indispensable to the OPC chief, hir-
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ing a family cook as well as locating potentially useful “good Germans.”33
When, however, Joe McCarthy began sniffing around the OPC, dropping hints in the Senate about a “convicted homosexual” occupying a “top-salaried important position” in the CIA (Offie had been arrested for “perversion” in 1943 after soliciting an undercover policeman in Washington’s Lafayette Park), Wisner felt obliged to move him over to the FTUC, where he functioned as Lovestone’s OPC liaison.34 As well as adding to the CIA’s apprehension about the security of FTUC operations (Sheffield Edwards reckoned Offie “about the worst of the OPC employees . . . some of whose backgrounds were horrible”),35 this move fueled the Lovestoneites’ tendency to defy the orders of the “Fizz kids” because the disgruntled Monk increasingly sided with the unionists against the spies.
Underlying the mutual security concerns of the FTUC and OPC were a host of largely unspoken social and ethnic tensions. At this time, the CIA still recruited most of its entry-level staff from the Ivy League universities, while its upper echelons were dominated by military top brass and corporate lawyers. It was therefore perhaps only to be expected that many senior intelligence officers would feel uncomfortable working alongside the ex-radical, immigrant-stock proletarians who staffed the FTUC. “In general, the Fizz kids are continuing their marked anti-labor and anti-Se-mitic tendencies in addition to their incompetence,” Lovestone once told Brown.36 This instinctive mistrust was reciprocated, with interest. On being introduced to him, Polish émigré Joseph Czapski immediately noticed that Lovestone, in his conversation, constantly “expressed a ‘class line’